Notes From a Gentler World
by webbedfeet
Summary: What it means to stay with someone to the end, and sometimes, you find a gentle world when you've stopped looking for it. C.C.xLelouch.


**Notes From a Gentler World**

C.C. always left the shelter before sunrise, carrying a bundle of torn sleeves Lelouch was using as rags. A stream of relatively clear water ran through their part of the ruins. She would dip the tattered fabric into it until it was thoroughly soaked, feeling the coolness of water and concrete flowing between her fingers. Then she would pull the whole piece up and twist it until it was almost dried, only to repeat the process again. It usually took her half an hour. Sometimes a scraggly waterweed would catch onto the clothes like tugging skeletal hands and it would take longer.

But no matter how early or how late she was, he was always up and waiting for her when she came back.

They barely exchanged a word with each other on any given day. Lelouch seldom spoke. He merely lay on his blanket (his old cape) and stared silently at the ceiling. She didn't know what he saw. She didn't know what he was thinking. She only knew enough to wipe away his blood and festering pus with her wet rags, when he let her, when she came back. And that his stifled gasps of pain would be the most noises he would make on a given day.

Most of Lelouch's wounds were on his abdomen, where he was hit with shrapnel and shredded metal. C.C. would have been there to protect him, normally, but she had been burning. Now he was rotting while alive. They were lucky enough that the shrapnel had managed to miss vital organs, but the wound was infected, the flesh around it turning a grotesque mix of white and purple. He usually wrapped his blanket around him to keep out flies. She cleaned the wound as well as she was able. Caught in the crossfire without their leader and with their ace pilot a smoking ruin, there was no Black Knight left to find them.

At night, she slept on the floor beside him because there were no beds. Nothing separated them but the space between life and death. She held his hand while he dreamed, knowing that he knew it, only releasing it in the morning for her ritual at the stream. Lelouch's wound would never get better with it, she knew, but it was something she did. A constant. Humans are illogical creatures, and they needed a ritual to stay alive, moreso than festivals. Moreso for Lelouch. He was a creature of systems, and having the tedium of schedules to rely on meant much more to him than the fortune of words and thoughts. He tenaciously clung to constants in order to change the universe.

His fingertips were always cold at night. They'd never held hands in their sleep before, but C.C. would like to think this was normal. Blood vessels pulsed weakly. He was holding on to life.

The one time they had a real conversation was the day he first woke up. He was a tattered mess. She had already recovered. Her left leg was still twisted, but she could still crawl over to him, cradle his head on her lap. They were still in the middle of the battlefield, though there was no longer anything that could be called a battle save for the squabbling of crows. Britannia had already left. His knights were gone. She ran a hand down his cheeks and waited for him to wake up.

"C.C." was his first word, eyes slowly opening as if they were heavy with alcohol, the left one still shining red. She bent down and looked at him. She did not smile.

"Yes, Lelouch. It's me."

"Am I alive?"

"You are."

"Hoped so. The battle?"

His voice was hoarse and brittle. She picked up a rock, threw it at the nearest gathering of crows. They scattered in a flutter of wings and caws, leaving behind only the fetid stench of roasted flesh.

"You lost."

Lelouch smiled weakly, bitterly. "I should've trained another field tactician to replace Toudou. Kallen?"

"Dead."

"The Order?"

"Dead."

He frowned. "All of them?"

"Yes."

When he spoke again, his voice was dry and no longer quite so confident. "We need to get out of here."

She knew there was no other way.

C.C. was not strong enough to drag him out from the debris just yet, so for a few hours they simply sat there, waiting for her leg to heal. She kept her head bent over him to keep his weak, dying body out of the burning sun. Her hair and clothes were mostly burned away from the fire that erupted in the Gawain's cockpit, but she could shield him with her arms. When he appeared thirsty (though he never complained), she lowered her head and kissed him on the lips, sharing moisture. He did not resist. She was simply keeping her part of the bargain.

He talked to her at reasonably spaced intervals. His sentences were often cluttered with words, too long for someone in his condition, sometimes rambling. He talked about what went wrong with his plans. He talked about the weather, the last time she ordered pizza and he made her tea. It was three months since the last time I talked to Nunnally, he said, and six months since Millay and Shirley and Rivalz and I don't know how long it's been for Suzaku anymore. And when he smiled and coughed and leaned against her arms, he didn't say, 'This is not finished, don't worry. They still have hell to pay.'

He was not the type of person to say 'Thank you,' after he had already said it once.

He would never say 'I'm sorry.'

So when he smiled and coughed and leaned against her arms, all he said was, "I don't have too many things left, do I?"

She didn't need to answer that question. He didn't want her to.

"There are as many forms of death as there are of love, Lelouch, but only one form of life," she replied. "One form of life, immortals and mortals both, defined by losing little things one by one. At this moment you are as deathless as I."

He snorted. "How so?"

"You have watched your life die. This is the definition of living forever."

She bent down and kissed him again.

Strength returned to her left leg in mid-afternoon, enough to pull Lelouch out from under the debris. He tore out Zero's frayed sleeves to staunch his wound, and she supported him as they walked away. Past the crows. Past the dead bodies. Past the broken Knightmares. Past Lelouch's failure. She knew that the scenery was not new to him, and he never spared it a glance. He kept his gaze straight, walking ahead, trying so very hard not to stumble and fall on his weak legs. He spotted the shelter just an hour shy of sunset, just in time before his strength ran out. It took little time to fix up the place, and she soon found water and caught a few rats for their evening meal.

That night he told her, in shorter and shorter sentences, the stories of nations, of his family, of his old dreams of being a renowned chess player. Of course C.C. had heard all of this before from her long life and Marianne, but she listened. Neither were storytellers, but it was the voice that mattered and not the words.

He held her hand and stared at the ceiling like it was a city of half-remembered stars.

When she returned from the stream in the morning, Lelouch would flick her a glance and sometimes an ironic smile. Some days she returned it. Other days, she simply went to the business of cleaning his wounds, the feverish heat of the infection dully informing them both that perhaps her efforts was not doing much good. The air would taste a bit like decay. The white sunlight would turn to orange then to crimson, then it would be night. They would have boiled rats or birds, depending on their luck. Neither would eat very much before night completely fell, and it would be stars again, stars and warmth and the reassurance of memories. A gentle, transient world in-between.

The last words C.C. heard from him were, "I wonder where I'd go, after this." Perhaps he was thinking about meeting his sisters, mother, friends, or anyone else he didn't want to see. Perhaps it was simply a rhetorical question. He must know where he would end up. He learned of that clause a long time ago.

So she said nothing, after all.

But what was there to say?

Lelouch's hand was warm in hers. His pulse was steady. He still, of course, had a reason to live.

But there are as many kinds of death as there are of love. It would not be long, not long at all, until they are together forever.

* * *

Disclaimer : I own neither Code Geass, its characters, nor its general awesomeness.


End file.
